Conversations

Commerce is awash with communications yet, for the most part, bereft of conversation.

Some of the biggest challenges facing business are confined to minutes, emails and nebulous exchanges characterised by self-interest. Passive or frivolous commercial exchanges are a waste time, they reduce matters to business-at-a-distance and hamper progress. If time is the most precious commodity available to us, why is it spent trying to manage a tsunami of communications and not bringing minds together to collaborate on outcomes?

There’s nothing better than engaging conversation. Think of those great dinners, Uni lectures, business meetings, even locker room chats where an exchange of thoughts validated your own, inspired a change in mindset, influenced a decision or sparked an idea that led to something.

In business, open, intelligent conversation is the great binder. It’s the glue that connects minds and takes them to new possibilities. No matter how serious the subject; technical, financial or problematic, insightful conversation with original thought will allow matters to proceed or problems to be addressed in a way that mere communication cannot.

All conversations are worthwhile, particularly end-of-business conversations. A great example is the post-tender debriefing discussion with ‘losing’ tenderers. These are too often relegated to hushed affairs done with the reverence of an obituary. Reassign knows that a supplier debrief is one of the most important events in the entire buy/sell cycle, so we join in frank and open discussion making certain that all prospective suppliers are well appraised of their efforts and the rationale behind all decisions. People respond very well when views are exchanged on that level.

Every Reassign client is having a continuous dialogue with us and so is every supplier and potential supplier. Every valuable inch we gain is attributable to discussions among ourselves, clients and suppliers in equal measure. Where there is no conversation – we start one because fruitful conversation is a characteristic of business time well spent.